Big Big Train in Barcelona: a masterclass in symphonic rock
Big Big Train play Barcelona for the first time: two sets at Razzmatazz 2, with career highlights and “Woodcut” in full, and the photos from the show.
Zakk Wylde puts the first Wylde Audio acoustic guitars on sale
The Grand Auditorium Acoustic reached shops on 6 October at 999 dollars. The second, with the Norse dragon over Pale Moon ebony, arrives in spring 2027.
Night Gaunt release “Rupture” on 6 November, eight years after “The Room”
The Rome quartet’s third record comes out on Aural Music. They have previewed “Of Clouds and Gleam” and now “The Deer and the Hunter”, with a lyric video.
Battlesnake recorded “Bogpocalypse And The Annihilation Of Lucifer” in Prague, out on 19 February
Eleven songs cut in three and a half weeks in Prague, following “Dawn Of The Exultants And The Hunt For The Shepherd”. The band calls it “a 90s Goosebumps novel with guns”.
Slight Layers release “Present Unfulfilled”, six tracks written after an all-improvised double album
The Hungarian band put it out on 2 October through Psychedelic Source Records and has now posted the full stream. It mixes new songs with re-recorded live sessions.
ECM gathers Steve Reich’s three records for the label into a three-LP box
It came out on 2 October, the day before Reich turned ninety, and collects “Music for 18 Musicians”, “Octet · Music for a Large Ensemble · Violin Phase” and “Tehilim”.
Jeffrey Lasky – Along the Midway Plaisance
Thirty-seven singles in four years and no album: the Chicago guitarist releases his first, and eight of the eleven tracks had already come out one at a time.
Ensemble neoN & Benedicte Maurseth – Always and Never the Same
Benedicte Maurseth’s Hardanger fiddle inside a contemporary music ensemble: eight pieces and forty-one minutes, out of a work premiered at Oslo’s Ultima festival in 2023.
Elin Forkelid – Plays For Trane, Vol. 2
The Swedish saxophonist goes back to the Coltrane of the final years with a piano-less quintet: five pieces in forty-two minutes, opened by a block of almost sixteen.
Gorm Askjær Trio – Microverse I
The Aarhus guitarist returns six years after his trio’s debut and adds clarinet and cello: twelve short pieces in thirty-nine minutes, between written chamber music and collective improvisation.
VIII Strada – Città Totale
Third album by the Milan band VIII Strada: twelve minutes of new music, five live tracks and a remastered reissue of their 2008 debut, across a hundred and five minutes.
Leprous are recording in Stockholm the album that will follow “Melodies of Atonement”
They are at Ghost Ward studios and the drum parts are done. No title and no release date have been given, and updates will come through their Patreon.
A video of her playing “Children of the Sea” got Becky Baldwin onto Tony Iommi’s new album
The Mercyful Fate bassist says she got an email from Iommi’s manager and assumed it was fake. The one who put her forward was producer Mike Exeter, who had been following her cover videos.
Tom Araya and Kerry King DJ the metal station in “Grand Theft Auto VI”
Rockstar Games has unveiled The Chamber, at 106.6 on the Leonida dial, with the two Slayer men as DJ Tom and DJ Kerry. The game is out on 19 November.
The Raconteurs play together again after seven years, in the encore of a Jack White show in Nashville
They closed White’s second night at the Truth with five songs, four of them off the debut. Third Man Records has just announced a box set for the 20th anniversary of “Broken Boy Soldiers”.
Rick Wakeman plays Starmus in the Canary Islands with a piano and orchestra piece based on Hawking’s lectures
The science and music festival founded by Brian May and Garik Israelian runs in Tenerife and La Palma from 17 to 22 October. Wakeman performs with Moldovan violinist Rusanda Panfili.
Wage War – Landfall
Second release in a single year from the Florida band: thirteen tracks where Cody Quistad’s cleans and Briton Bond’s lows finally share the ground, with two songs carried over from April’s EP.
Kevin Haynes Grupo Elegua – Inner Outer Alignment Vol. 1
Hard bop, Cuban rhythms and Yoruba batá drums across five tracks: the alto player and ordained Ifá priest gathers Moses Boyd, Daniel Casimir and Deschanel Gordon around a very fast horn.
Punkt.Vrt.Plastik – Kompress
Draksler, Eldh and Lillinger take the piano trio apart for the fourth time: an interval from Ligeti, a Swedish hymn from 1589 and a club piano that judders like a mistracked record.
Toundra – Siete
The Madrid quartet’s first album without founder Esteban Girón and the first they have put out themselves: seven tracks mixed by Santi García, with the synths as the floor and a drum machine on “Costa Roja”.
Dallas Seger of Manic Abraxas releases “Azure” as David Caress: twelve songs made on his own
The Seger Guitars luthier launches a solo post-punk project. Steve Austin of Today Is The Day mixed and mastered it.
Ignite release “Still Wide Awake” on 15 January on their own label and preview two songs
The album comes out on 93rpm, the label they founded themselves, and has Comeback Kid’s Andrew Neufeld on one of the ten tracks. It is the second with Eli Santana singing.
Ferg Ireland releases “Alive In London”, his chordless trio caught live
Recorded at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho with Nathaniel Facey on alto saxophone and James Maddren on drums, five years after the same trio’s first album.
Night In Gales preview “Emberfield Veil” and the new album lands on 13 November with Fredrik Nordström at the desk
The German melodic death metal band put out the lyric video for the first single. Apostasy Records releases “Bitter Harvest” with a Paolo Girardi cover.
Repugnant turn up inside a horror film, with Watain’s singer on “Premature Burial”
“V/H/S/Mixtape”, released on Shudder on 9 October, includes a video by the band Tobias Forge had before Ghost. Neither he nor the band has said anything about it.
Jack Donovan, Elder’s bassist, is home after open-heart surgery
The pneumonia he was admitted with in Portland was hiding a congenital heart condition. The postponed US dates still have no replacements and the February European run stands.
Devin Townsend releases “Harmonic Dharma” on 16 October, the sleep record he sold on the acoustic tour
It comes out under the DreamPeace name, the ambient project he set up against his insomnia, and he wrote it after a month on retreat following “The Moth”.
Early Moods – Ready For The Grave
Third album from the East LA band, produced by Toshi Kasai, who also plays banjo, theremin and keys on it. Classic-rooted doom played fast, with a Mariusz Lewandowski cover.
Taihr – Allicanto
German-Chilean septet from Cologne, second album and first for Tonzonen: seven songs written one apiece, new horns and a bird from Chilean myth pierced by an arrow on the sleeve.
Ok Goodnight – stop/go
Third album from the Boston quartet that came out of Berklee: prog with guest sax, clarinet and flute, ten songs that bleed into one another and Casey Lee Williams holding it all up.
Leoni Jane Kennedy – Synthetic
Debut album from the British guitarist Brian May and Roger Taylor gave a scholarship to at eighteen: seven songs road-tested for years, with the Hammond on “Sloe” and the guitar nearly always down in the foundations.
NeBeLNeST – Saalfelden 2007
The French band’s last ever concert, taped at the Saalfelden festival in August 2007 and issued by Cuneiform eighteen and a half years later. Mellotrons, sax and zeuhl bass.
Musea puts “Buried Alive” on its Bandcamp, Änglagård’s last show before they split
The live album, recorded at the Variety Arts Centre in Los Angeles on 5 November 1994 and released in 1996, is available again thirty years on, in digital form.
Sweet Relief opens a fund for Richie Cipriano, the Sick Of It All bassist on “Blood, Sweat and No Tears”
The musician has pancreatic cancer. The organisation is raising money for his treatment and the Revelation Records store is selling a shirt with the proceeds going to the fund.
Lovebites will play no shows in 2027 and say they will be back onstage in 2028
The Tokyo band announced it on Friday on their Facebook page, at the end of a tenth-anniversary year with a new album, Wacken and a first night at the Nippon Budokan.
Ankor release “I See Red” on 20 November, seven songs about the villains of “Naruto”
The band from Els Pallaresos are back with an album on UNFD and have shared “ITACHI · blood moon”. Neither of the two tours they have announced for the autumn has a Spanish date.
Bad Religion reissue “Into the Unknown” with an apology letter, and the thousand copies sell out
Epitaph has pressed the band’s 1983 second album again, the one with organs and synthesizers, and tucked in a letter signed by Brett Gurewitz and Greg Graffin. It sold out the same day.
Mastodon press 170 copies of “Marrow Deep” with dust from fossil mastodon teeth
Loma Vista is raffling off the chance to buy one until 12 October: a double LP at $150 with the dust pressed into the grooves, a certificate of authenticity and shipping to three countries only.
V.V. Lightbody – Period Piece
Thirty-six minutes for ten songs and the first album the Chicago singer and flautist has produced herself. Eight of the ten don’t reach four minutes.
David Bode – Live at the 2026 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
Twenty-two musicians in the WWOZ Jazz Tent, eight arrangements and five tracks that aren’t music. Bode brings Garrett, Buckley, Coltrane and Radiohead.